science

Don't forget the disposal of the nuclear waste.

Well, I was a bit surprised by the carbon footprint of nuclear after I went and did some research on this. The emissions from nuclear fuel mining and preparation are about 34g CO2e/kWh.^1^ So less than what the article estimates for Frances grid, but not by much. I wonder if they only estimate the fuel or if the building costs are not significant over the plants lifetime.

Collective nouns be super random.

My guess is that each piece of generating equipment can be called into action like a ship at sea.

Almost any group of things is sometimes called a fleet.

But yeah, "nuclear fleet" almost always means something else.

it's just another part of the eternal war between the french and jellyfish.

https://www.sciencealert.com/swarming-jellyfish-just-shut-down-a-nuclear-reactor-for-the-second-time

Not half. "About 15%" of nuclear power plants were shut down due to water sources that were too warm for environmentally safe discharge.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/heatwave-expected-limit-15-frances-nuclear-fleet-friday-2026-08-13/

But that's still a significant percentage.

It shows the importance of diversifying energy production. In Quebec it's all hydro, but sometimes the weather means the reservoirs can get low over the years. It affects production in a serious way and can take time to build up again.

Wind and solar are also affected by weather patterns in their own ways. Maybe less so or at least maybe different factors. Hedging and balancing grid production is going to be a new challenge.

Fossil fuels did have the advantage of being pretty easy to ramp up or down, whenever, for whatever reason. Some countries might want to keep around older but very efficient fossil fuel plants as backups for these kinds of events. That or waste incineration for example.

Completely false, at peak heat interruptions power generation is shuttered by 15%

Totally the fault of France.

Forgotten is the decade Germany was buying nuclear energy from France because it couldn't generate enough of its own and renewables couldn't carry even a tiny bit of the load.

If only i could re-coal why Germany has such a high carbon intensity for its electricity production...

Not much local(!) CO₂.

Truckloads of dangerous waste (a few lorries’ worth a year per plant), which is only dangerous if you stand close to it in the next 10,000 years or so, something that can be mitigated by how one stores it. (Keeping it under water attenuates much of the radiation, for example.) Or, alternatively, it can be reprocessed to make more reactor fuel.

So it’s less than ideal, though one has to measure the quantity of waste and the risks against the certainty of health costs of fossil fuels (which are visible in cancer statistics even when everything is working perfectly).

Would you like to source that? ALL of the High Level nuclear Waste from the planet can be fit into a 21m cube

https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-all-the-nuclear-waste-in-the-world/

Medium level waste and low level waste can be deposited in normal surface landfills. LLW is normaly considered non radioactive in 50 years MLW 200. Fun fact there are entire cities that are more naturally radioactive than what we consider MLW. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6709356/

I'd like to make an edit here later on and specify the reason that we do not put it into a 21 m cube is because it would go super critical.

mountains?

I think you misspelled Russian bots (look into how much their economy is tied to energy sales)